Column: Olympics fervor hard to resist
Published Feb. 19, 2010
As far as I'm concerned, the Olympics are among the best forms of entertainment. I can never really decide which part of the Olympics is my favorite.
The sports lover in me loves the competition, the traveler in me adores the parade of nations, the history geek in me enjoys the tidbits thrown in by broadcasters and displayed in the opening and closing ceremonies and the peace-lover in me focuses on how the athletes from different sports interact amicably and even consider each other friends.
There really are so many different facets as to why the Olympic games are so mesmerizing.
It's intriguing how with so many competing nations, we still decide who to cheer for when the U.S. is out of the competition.
My immediate jumps are to Canada, our neighbor and host, the U.K. and Germany, my heritage, and from there, whoever has the best stories, usually underdogs.
Still, nothing is better than joining in on enthusiastic cheers of "USA! USA!"
The games also put a human face on countries we sometimes want to distinguish more for their governmental practices than for the hearts of their people.
This was exemplified in the Chinese gold-medal winning figure skating pair, Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo. No matter how I might frown on the Chinese practice of pulling children from their families to make them athletes, once it was clear a Chinese pair would take the gold medal in the event, I cheered for it to be them. It's impossible not to hope this married couple could get what they fought for to the point where they live in separate dormitories in their training facility. They're people, not policies. It's perfectly OK to cheer for them.
Of course, the method of cheering for these teams and people is one of the most fun parts.
I have to admit watching the Olympics has made me terribly homesick because this is the first time I'm watching without my mom and sister.
My first memory relevant to the Winter Olympics was cheering with them for Picabo Street in the 1998 Nagano games. The adjustment to watching here at MU is a little hard.
I watched the Opening Ceremony in the lounge, which might or might not have been a bad idea. There were plenty of laughs from people coming in and asking questions, such as "Are those real whales?" and "Why is Batman in the canoe?"
I got more than a little frustrated with the concept of looking up people from Canada on Wikipedia and reading it aloud during the introduction of the native people of Canada.
Sorry, Justin Bieber and Celine Dion, I honestly don't care if you're from Canada when there's culture to be learned. Since then, I've been watching the competition from my room.
It's not because of the annoying aspects of watching with the group; that I can put aside. My main reason has been an excess of exams and papers, one or the other, for each of my classes within a week at a highly inconvenient time.
When I do leave my room during the Olympic time slot to go to dinner or take a break, I'm amused at the display of passion the students have for the competitions.
My favorite story with this is going out during the non-primetime Olympic broadcast. As I waited for the elevator, around the corner I heard yells of "Choke! Choke!"
Peeking to see what was on, I was surprised to find there were more than 10 guys in the lounge actively watching curling. I'm definitely not the only one to have caught the Olympic spirit.